Pagefile on SD

Off topic, but I guess you got the replacement card from Dell lol. Did they complaint about AS5?

This is a bad idea simply because flash memory of any type is not *meant* for the amount and *speed* of I/O transactions this will place on the card. Flash is only really limited by the amount of read/write cycles the cells can take before failing. SD cards aren't exactly the most *robust* type as well.

Don't think about using a thumbdrive, either.

It would be an extremely idiotic idea. For one thing, it wouldn't make sense from a performance aspect, as it'd be way slower. For another thing, it'd probably hose your SD cards in short order. For a third aspect, the cost of a good SD card (not those cheap slow pieces of crap you get on sale or at low cost) would be WAY better spent on a memory upgrade (I assume you have 1GB or less).

This reminds me of the people who, back in the day (and I suppose they still do) were obsessed with putting their paging file onto a ramdisk, which entirely defeats the point of HAVING a pagefile. In that situation, they'd be way better off simply shutting OFF the pagefile. Not that that's the best idea in the first place, but it acheives the same thing (not paging to disk) without the huge memory waste of paging from memory to MEMORY, but also without the performance problems involved with paging information to memory when you don't have to (since if you used that ramdisk for actual memory, you wouldn't need to page as much to the page file).

Really, if you get 2GB of RAM in a system these days, your page file shouldn't be a performance concern. And if you don't have 2GB, paying money to try to improve pagefile performance is money down the drain.

I wouldn't be so quick to write this off...there's a reason Readyboost caches part of your paging file on flash media. Speaking of which, there's your answer. You don't actually want the whole paging file on a SD card, slower sequential reads/reliability as mentioned above. However, flash is good for random access compared to a hard drive, which is why Readyboost works.

I think i saw a radyboost sd card somewhere so wonnage is rigth about not writing this off. For Achilles, dell replaced my mobo and GPU and they said nothing about AS5 on processor or GPU so i don't think it's an issue.

I should've specified...yes, readyboost is vista-only. The SD cards that say "vista ready" don't have anything special in software, it just means that they're fast enough. The SD card firmware handles reads/writes anyways, thats where the load distribution is handled.

i've seen some sd's with the vista ready, and others with the vista ready and readyboost. It seems to me as if the ones with the vista ready are just certified to work with vista but not fast enough for Readyboost. Also yep it's vista only, it was one of the things that was anounce as an improvement on vista when thenyshowed that awesome asus lappie with the info lcd on the outside, and they talked about other functionality included on the os.

No, readyboost doesn't mean there's anything to this.

Readyboost just acts as a cache. It pre-caches information so that applications launch faster. This has nothing to do with putting the paging file onto an SD card. About the only connection you can draw there is that SuperFetch stores similar pre-cached info in free RAM.

Putting the pagefile on a much slower SD card probably isn't going to do you any good, and I'll reiterate that you're always going to be better off spending that money on a memory upgrade.

Faster random access times aren't going to do you much good when you need to swap out a few hundred megs for that game that you alt-tabbed out of, for example. But having enough physical memory so that it doesn't need to swap it out, that WILL make a big difference.

Basically, the answer to your question is "sort of", and only if you're using Vista. If you have $50 laying around go get yourself some actual RAM. But if you happen to have a thumbdrive (don't we all? swag! ) you can have Windows use it as a disk cache for parts of the pagefile and other small disk I/O operations. It does make a difference.

No, you're using ReadyBoost, which just pre-caches applications. It's not putting parts of the pagefile on it.

You're talking about Superfetch.

No, I'm not. SuperFetch uses free physical RAM to cache the data. ReadyBoost uses a USB device to do the same thing.

Come on...straight from the Windows Vista team blog (first page of google results!): http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/wi...t-windows.aspx

Gus is right, this has nothing to do with putting the page file on a flash device.
And he is also right about that idea having no merit. You may notice that the quotes you produced do not mention the paging file anywhere...

If you would bother looking back to the first post I made in the thread I never said that putting the whole thing on a flashdrive would be a good idea. I just wanted to point out to him that his idea had already been implemented, but more intelligently, as ReadyBoost. By the way, virtual memory == pagefile